Before “starving artist” meant living with your parents until you’re 47, scraping a living doing webcam porn while dreaming of making 0.00002p for 127m Spotify plays, the phrase had a certain romance.
That was when it meant turret-room melancholy, dope-den songwriting sessions and recording thrift store instruments around kitchen tables with the scratching of rats in the walls for percussion. It was early Tindersticks, the sound of downtrodden poets in dead men’s suits making drowsy, heartbreaking chamber ballads on what sounded like two-string violins, toothless pianos, tea-chest drums and gallons of recreational cough syrup. Their music was clogged by urban filth, bruised by urban violence and not so much lo-fi as scratched into Formica with nicotined fingernails. For those of us hammering out experimental novels through a heartbroken whiskey blur, as this writer was in 1993, Tindersticks were like some out-of-control inner monologue. They spoke to us through the bottom of bottles and haunted our hangovers.
Their self-titled debut double album was a masterpiece of down-at-heel sophistication and rakish menace recorded entirely, it seemed, in a Nottingham slum basement – the nocturnal buzz, the drunk trumpeters, the fliptop click of cigarette lighters, the wicked men playing rickety upright pianos last tuned shortly before a fire in an east London music hall in 1932. The early single Marbles, a bedlam of overlapping spoken-word poetry, came on like a visit from a gangland bailiff – “Men in suits and black shiny shoes moving in, kicking, stamping, bland expressionless faces, a handful of marbles thrown in a dustbin”. City Sickness was a pop symphony on a ready-meal budget. They even managed to throw in elements of Lee Hazelwoodesque country noir without coming over like mutton-chopped Midlands hicks clodhopping around working men’s clubs on Nashville night. By turns suave, lovelorn and animalistic, this was an album of lust, love and violence, of – as their own song titles had it – Blood, Jism, Whiskey & Water, washed down with dashes of honey.
Through it all, cotton-mouthed singer Stuart Staples cut a dolorous, unsettling figure. He was a plaintive victim in scratchy breakup ballads like Blood and Patchwork, a repentant alcoholic wifebeater on Drunk Tank and, in the twisted narrative of Tyed, an arthouse Ted Bundy: “The sheet that was cut and caught the blood was opened, dried and stretched out, hung on the wall.” Channelling the demonic seduction techniques of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and Tom Waits, Tindersticks were a ramshackle cabaret crew press-ganged into the devil’s work, and Staples was their mumbling Mephistopheles.
Like most evil cults, they played on our obsession. Collectibility was key, and their singles were rare artefacts. Bagging ultra-limited first editions of the Marbles and Unwired EPs was a source of great joy to deluded students who wrongly equated ownership of obscure indie singles with guaranteed sexual success. Back when Record Store Day was barely a glint in the eye of the nation’s manufacturers of bacon-flavoured vinyl, these were the markers of true musical insight and dedication. Even today it would take an inordinate eBay sum to make me part with my Tindersticks vinyl. I’d feel a little violated by the thought of anyone else hearing my personal copy of Marbles’ B-side, For Those …, which is Tindersticks’ best song and still the most wonderful use of chamber strings I’ve ever heard in pop. A tangle of violins, instruments usually associated with plush precision, sounded detuned and broken, straining for notes in reflection of the song’s “not so beautiful” people, for whom “hearts are not given as gifts but earned”. It’s a hobo concerto, all the more beautiful for its hang-nails and split ends. A Fontana di Trevi of flaws.
Which is why, for me, Tindersticks are one of very few bands that were better unknown. I’ve never been one of those ultra-possessive, I-saw-them-first dicks who ditch a band the second they sell their 14th record or Jools Holland decides they’d be vastly improved by a bit of boogie-woogie piano. But as Tindersticks’ popularity grew, so did their high-art ambitions. Now they could afford to record proper orchestras at Abbey Road rather than their sole violinist Dickon Hinchliffe in an outside privy, they gradually scraped away that layer of filth, poverty and cruelty that still keeps their debut among my five favourite albums of all time. Their second, also titled Tindersticks and very nearly as brilliant, signposted their plan to ditch the shabby whiskey saloon for the members’ bar – the artwork showed the band getting fitted for suits and the music leavened their darker, stickier deviances with orchestral arrangements that wouldn’t send Burt Bacharach running for his cocktail-stocked safe room.
By 1999’s Simple Pleasures, they had begun to introduce comfy soul and jazz elements, musical antibiotics designed to hunt out and destroy the sort of abnormalities that had originally made Tindersticks so engrossing. Melodically they still bordered on the sublime but, in Jennifer Connelly terms, they were more He’s Just Not That Into You than Requiem for a Dream.
It took a five-year hiatus and losing half of the band between 2003’s Waiting for the Moon and 2008’s The Hungry Saw to nudge them back towards the edge. The latter’s title track detailed the course of a serial killer’s hacksaw through their victim’s body, while Mother Dear sounded like an electric guitarist having a psychotic meltdown during an otherwise sedate Sunday night down the Jazz Cafe and smashing his Fender into the art deco light fittings. Come 2012’s The Something Rain they were revisiting the lengthy mood poems of their early albums in the form of Chocolate, a long-winded and rather more explicit Lola, climaxing (as it were) with the deathless line “My lips moved up her legs … What the fuck? I had a large hard dick poking me in the eye. ‘Shit! you’re a chap!’” These, and modestly experimental new album The Waiting Room, are still slick and soulful records, but with a glimmer of the old sedition. They may no longer be starving, but Tindersticks have got some of their hunger back.
